


Five Traits of Humanity That Mark Watney Had Forgotten About (And One Which Was Better Than He Remembered)

by wneleh



Category: The Martian (2015)
Genre: But It Had To Happen, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Multi, Yeah I got up this morning wrote a threesome and went to church
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-04
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2018-04-24 20:20:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4933927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wneleh/pseuds/wneleh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was nothing affably aloof about having someone wipe your butt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Traits of Humanity That Mark Watney Had Forgotten About (And One Which Was Better Than He Remembered)

Mark’s ribs don’t hurt – don’t REALLY hurt - until they’ve pushed him en masse, rugby-fashion, through and down and into the main ring with its .4 g – designed to match Mars – and he’s turned and twisted to land on his feet – something he’d done a million times, give or take several orders of magnitude, on the trip out – and the weight of his upper body on cracked bone is just TOO MUCH and his body and brain together say, “Nuh uh, Dr. Watney, you’ve put us through too much shit today already for us to take this,” and his vision turns red, and he can’t draw the breath to scream…

And now he’s lying in the med bay, presumably on Dr. Christopher Beck’s favorite cot, and Chris is looking at him wearing his "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" smirk, backed by an ashen Commander Lewis (but she always looks so pale that Mark’d wondered if she actually had a functioning circulatory system), and he thinks that maybe he might be able to get in a proper scream finally, but, no, things aren’t really hurting so much anymore.

Anywhere.

Ah, modern pharmacology. Thank you I love you good night.

But Chris was slapping his cheek – high-tech, that – and saying, “No, no, no you don’t, I need you awake so that we can get this suit off you,” and Mark cracks an eye open – a very deliberate choice, because with Chris you could never be too cool – and asks, “Why?”

Well, ‘slurred’ might be a better term. And he might even have drooled a little. This wasn’t going at all according to plan…

_Too fast, he was going too fast, he was going to die in space, which was in no way preferable to dying on Mars because on Mars he was learning and doing and his microbes might even survive and colonize and evolve and in a billion years take over the galaxy but in space he would drift forever…_

And Chris was tapping his cheek again. He really needed to stop doing that.

“You back?” Chris asks and Mark manages, “Can I blink once for yes, twice for no?” and Martinez (out of Mark’s line of sight, had he been there all along?) says, “He’s back.”

“Because I want to make sure we’re not causing more damage,” Chris says, and it takes a beat before Mark realizes Chris was answering his question about why-awake. Ed-ness. Something.

“Nothin’ hurts,” Mark says – face it, slurs. “Drugs, man. Trippy.”

“I gave you barely enough Demerol to slow a three-year-old.”

But then, as Chris, Martinez, and Commander Lewis start doing things with Mark’s head and torso that Mark would really, really, REALLY have preferred to be able to do for himself, Chris says, “You’ve got the body fat of a three-year-old, dude, so there you go.”

Which was okay, really, Mark knew what Chris was doing. As an MD-PhD, Chris hadn’t had to do a whole lot of patient care, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have some basic bedside skills.

So it’s Commander Lewis, not Chris or (bless him) Martinez, who gasps when she gets a good look at him, sees (Mark assumes) skin shrunken around cracked ribs, fat and muscle both depleted. 

“Hey, I’m doing pretty good for a dead guy,” Mark says, and he means, ‘for a guy who looks like an animated skeleton,’ not ‘a guy you left for dead’ – REALLY, that’s what he’d meant, maybe – but Commander Lewis’s face shuts down, and Martinez was now trying to kill him with a death glare, and Chris’s expression hadn’t changed AT ALL which was actually the worst because he’d always been able to read Chris the best of any of them.

“I’m a real prick,” Mark says. “I’d forgotten.”

Which was the right thing to say, finally.

\- - - - -

“You don’t have to be here, Commander,” Chris says softly, “Martinez’s got this,” and this irritates Lewis, who now tells Martinez to go inventory what equipment they’ve lost and Mark has no idea what they’re talking about – he’d picked up that they’d had to engineer some sort of explosion earlier but he hadn’t been following the details – and now Martinez is bristling but he can’t talk back to Lewis and so Chris says, “How can you inventory things you DON’T have?”

And it’s too much, too much, too much… Mark inhales too deep, too fast, and can’t, and coughs, and can’t…

“Easy, brother.” Martinez is in his face, stroking something down and away from his eyes. “Easy, it’s okay, nobody’s mad at anyone.”

And Martinez has nailed it. 

“I’d forgotten,” Mark rasps. “I’d forgotten people fight.”

“Makes sense,” says Martinez. “It’s a good thing to forget. But you know it’s inevitable, right? People snap at each other. Doesn’t mean mom and dad are getting a divorce.”

“Yeah,” Mark breathes. “I’m fine. Insubordinate on.”

Because that’s another thing he’d forgotten. The chain of command. Everywhere, everywhere, human society wasn’t flat. 

That one was going to be a bitch to readjust to!

\- - - - - - -

He drifts a little; closes his eyes while Chris starts an IV for rehydration, keeps them closed as they take off his many layers below the waist, lets them clean him up because he has no choice, Chris doing the dirty (literally!) work, Lewis assisting, Martinez now seemingly in charge of keeping him from freaking out too badly. Mark’s deeply resentful but even more deeply grateful, and is also somewhat surprised by how good Martinez is at this - he and Martinez were friendly, but not friends, both having honed an affable aloofness that didn’t quite line up.

There was nothing affably aloof about having someone wipe your butt.

His face must have given away more distress than he was actually feeling because Martinez was demanding his attention again. “Let them do this, Mark,” he says. “They want to do this for you.”

And that was another thing Mark had forgotten. He’d been hanging his hopes on the human need to rescue the lone toddler in the well, never mind the million with malaria. He’d forgotten what was behind this – the need to care, the need to show love, personally and intimately.

Damn, he was going to start crying again.

“Easy,” Martinez says into his ear, taking a hand and squeezing it. “Easy. They’re almost done.”

Lewis is called away, but squeezes his other hand as she goes; Beth Johanssen takes her place, which is less than ideal, really; in the back of his mind there’s always been the thought that, if aliens ever came to their solar system and made him date an astronaut, he'd choose Dr. Beth. Or Dr. Chris, but Dr. Beth would be his first choice.

“Guys, you could at least give him a blanket,” she says, unfurling one she’s found somewhere and placing it over and around him.

“Still need to inspect his ribs,” Chris says. 

“Then do the ‘picaboo’ thing doctors always do,” says Beth. 

“That’s annoying as hell,” says Martinez.

“It’ll keep him warmer, give him more privacy too,” says Beth, and now they’re all talking about him, rather than to him, which has to stop. He opens his eyes and she’s looking towards his face so he smiles and she smiles back but one of her hands is touching Chris in a way that Mark, though only minimally trained in emergency medicine, is pretty sure isn’t necessary to the tasks at hand.

He looks toward Martinez. “Are they?” he mouths.

“Together? Yeah, they set up housekeeping a while back,” says Martinez, and now Chris and Beth are both looking sheepish.

“I guess it happened not long after we left Mars the first time,” says Beth, and DAMN that hurts, that they hadn’t MOURNED him, they’d – they’d – they’d…

Continued living. How about that. 

He’d completely forgotten that this was something humans did. Perhaps the biggest thing that he’d forgotten. He quirks a smile and says, “Congrats.”

\- - - - - -

Chris wraps his ribs – says it’s against current protocol, but that it will make him more comfortable in the short term, and besides, who the hell knows how ribs heal in lower-then-Earth gravity? The ASPCA and NASA, it seems, had never quite come to an agreement on how to conduct experiments on animal models.

“I’m going to get a paper out of this,” Chris muses.

Then they help him sit, very, very slowly, and Mark feels a little light-headed for a moment, but then Vogel and Lewis come in with dinner, and he’s eating bits of sausage and rice pilaf and a slice of French bread covered in butter that is better than anything ever eaten by anyone, ever.

“Do I still have my room,” he asks, “Or did you turn it into a home gym?”

“Sewing room,” says Beth. 

“We left things pretty much as they were,” Commander Lewis says. “Didn’t need the space. And then of course once we knew we were coming back for you we, um, tidied a little. Oh, and I dusted this morning.”

They look at her.

“It’s a stress response, okay? A pretty healthy one.”

“But tonight you’re staying with us,” says Beth. 

Okay…

“When IS night, anyway?” he asks.

“Whenever you want it to be.”

\- - - - - -

So that’s how he ends up in the now-combined quarters of doctors Johanssen and Beck, reclined, not against a pile of pillows, but against Chris, while Beth (he hopes she doesn’t take Chris’s name if they marry, because ‘Beth Beck’ sounds silly – or like a superhero– actually, Beth Beck is a GREAT superhero name, what was he thinking…) 

…does things…

…oh so gently…

…and Chris…

…and…

And then he’s waking up between them in near dark, and his ribs are hurting, but that doesn’t matter because Beth is nuzzled against him to his left, her hand on his hip, and Chris is flat on his back snoring to his right, and Mark thinks that he might really weep now, would weep except Chris’s snoring is ANNOYING so he pokes him instead and Chris comes awake and is now staring at him from inches away.

“That was unexpected,” Mark says, and Chris says, “Welcome home,” and Mark says, “broadly defined,” and now Chris is kissing him again and, no, Mark hadn’t forgotten about sex – that humans were sexual beings – had thought about it quite a bit, actually – but he hadn’t remembered it well enough, not nearly well enough; nor had he given much thought to its combinations and permutations.

Fortunately, he was adaptable.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I felt a little odd about writing a story based on a movie I've only seen once, that's tied so closely to a novel I haven't read. But I've done a little sampling - my husband read and loved it, so it's in the house - and it's safe to say that my style and Andy Weir's couldn't be more different.


End file.
